DOT cranks up its campaign to strip bike lane references from federal websites

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DOT cranks up its campaign to strip bike lane references from federal websites

By Joel Rose

Thursday, July 23, 2026 • 5:00 AM EDT

Heard on Morning Edition

WASHINGTON — In the two weeks since Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy vowed to end support for "DEI bike lanes," a growing list of bike-related safety materials have disappeared from the Federal Highway Administration's website.<br>Even agency staff have been left guessing about why, said a person who works in web support for agencies at the Department of Transportation. They requested anonymity because they fear retribution for speaking publicly.<br>The person said FHWA staff have been asked to find, and in some cases take down, any references to bikes and bike lanes.

Related Story: NPR<br>"Why do you need to take down bicycle safety, of all things?" they told NPR.<br>"We're not making the sites better, faster or quicker, you know, able to provide real information to the communities that use these resources," they said. "It's asinine."<br>Questions remain over Trump administration's review of safety resources

Federal transportation officials have pulled down or edited dozens of pages of safety resources in the past week, according to an analysis by the Internet Archive Wayback Machine and internal FHWA emails obtained by NPR.<br>While there has been no official explanation, the changes appear to be part of a broader push to find and remove road safety materials from the FHWA website.<br>Earlier this month, the FHWA quietly removed a set of recommendations — including bike lanes and speed cameras — from a list of "Proven Safety Countermeasures" that have been vetted by agency staff and shown to improve road safety.<br>A DOT spokesperson told NPR in an emailed statement on Wednesday that the department "continuously reviews its policies to ensure each promotes safety, efficiency, and common sense."<br>"Since nearly 80% of the population uses cars to get to work and their important medical appointments, we are taking a closer look at federal guidance to ensure American families have the infrastructure they need," the spokesperson said. "This is a common sense approach despite the Left's belief that everyone should ride a bike to their shoebox-sized apartment to eat crickets to achieve a phony climate agenda."<br>But safety advocates warn that the Trump administration is undermining proven measures for reducing roadway crashes and fatalities, including some that date back decades.<br>One of the safety tools that has been taken down is known as the Pedestrian and Bicycle Crash Analysis Tool, or PBCAT. As of Thursday, a link to the page that formerly hosted the tool on the FHWA website was dead.<br>The tool is designed to capture detailed information about crashes involving cars, bicycles and pedestrians, including what combinations of vehicle maneuvers and roadway conditions led to the crash, which can help planners and safety advocates develop countermeasures to prevent similar crashes.<br>"That's really important because it helps us do a better job of tracking pedestrian and bicyclist fatalities across the nation," said David Harkey, who was the lead researcher on the project that initially developed the tool at the University of North Carolina's Highway Safety Research Center.<br>Today, Harkey is the president of the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS), a nonprofit organization funded by the auto insurance industry that works to reduce motor vehicle crash fatalities and injuries.<br>Harkey told NPR he's disappointed by the decision to remove the tool from the FHWA's website.<br>"This is an agency that claims that safety is a priority for them," he said. "It's important that proven tools and resources like PBCAT are there on their site and are available for safety professionals across the country."<br>Local and state officials may still be able to make use of PBCAT even if it's not publicly available on the FHWA website, Harkey said, because it's already embedded in the way they track crashes. Still, he would prefer the tool to be widely available from FHWA.<br>Based on his organization's conversations with FHWA staff, Harkey says the web tool remains "under review," though he said the details are murky.<br>"It's not clear to us what is being reviewed, what the criteria are, what they are looking for," Harkey said. "Hopefully this review will get completed sooner rather than later."<br>But Harkey isn't optimistic. He says the FHWA pulled down another critical safety tool — a database known as the Highway Safety Information System — 18 months ago. It still hasn't been restored.<br>"That's one of the frightening things about this process," Harkey said. "We've heard the same story that things are under review, and that once that review is completed, they hope to be able to put it back up. But we haven't seen that."<br>DOT staff are told to remove bike safety language 2 days after Duffy's "DEI" post

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